Bradley Roby thinks he has stepped away from the dark cloud that shadowed the first half of his junior season at Ohio State, but he also knows that cornerbacks are only one play away from another storm.

“It was frustrating a little bit,” Roby said of his star-crossed start this year.

It included a suspension for the season opener due to an altercation at a bar and continued with on-field struggles, most glaringly in a win over Wisconsin four games ago and an ejection from the Iowa game two weeks ago.

“I feel like it was something I had to go through,” said Roby, all-Big Ten last year and a preseason All-American this year. “I learned a lot throughout that whole time.

“To be good at corner, you have to concentrate on the little things. It’s all about the details. You have to keep a certain mindset throughout the whole game. And if you get off that mindset, it can go bad just like this quick (finger snap) at corner.”

Roby considered a jump to the NFL after last season but decided to stay at OSU, then said in the spring that this would be his final college season (he’s a fourth-year junior).

OSU coach Urban Meyer thought Roby might have had some “buyer’s remorse” in the spring about deciding to return, and that it affected his play. Roby admitted as much, but said that “by the time summer came around, I was full ready to go” again as a college player.

It didn’t show. From the suspension, to getting beat a couple of times for touchdowns at California, to seeing Wisconsin receiver Jared Abbrederis have a 10-catch night, to getting ejected for what officials ruled was a high targeting hit on an Iowa tight end, Roby had ridden a bucking bull this season.

He didn’t agree with the ruling in the Iowa game, and neither did Meyer. But it might have been the epitome of his junior season, although his other gaffes had been more glaring.

“Obvious struggles,” Roby called them.

“Anytime a cornerback gets beat, everybody is going to see it, so it was obvious, and it was something I had to deal with,” he said.

“I always like to learn from my mistakes, so when I make a big mistake, I really sit back and say, ‘Dang, how did that happen? Why did that happen?’ And I don’t make the same mistake again.”

Last week against Penn State, Roby didn’t do anything that stood out, but he did a lot of little things well.

“I thought he had his best game,” Meyer said.

Roby was neither pressing nor playing timidly; he looked comfortable.

“At corner, you’ve just got to wait for the plays to come to you, you can’t go to the plays because, when you try to do that too much, that’s when you get beat on double moves or a deep pass,” Roby said. “You’ve just got to wait for it to come to you, and if you’re a good player, you’ll make the plays.”

The change in mindset, as he put it, actually came in the wake of the Wisconsin game.

“It changed something in my head: I’m not playing to impress anybody, I’m playing to do my job and to make plays for my teammates,” Roby said. “Once you change your mindset from trying to please scouts, fans, other people; once you change that to just making plays for my teammates, doing my job, that’s when it all shifts.